Changing the Past (15 page)

He got the Riggins number from Information in his hometown and called it.

“Betty Jane, believe it or not, this is Jack Kellog.” He waited a long moment for her scream, but it did not come. “Jack Kellog,” he repeated. “Your old high-school pal.”

“Funny you would call just now,” Betty Jane said at last in a solemn voice he did not remember. “Yesterday I buried Gordon.”

“God,” said Jackie. “I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.” This was true. He felt as though his heart would break, though he had cared nothing for Riggins even as a boy. “He was a good man.”

“No, he wasn't,” Betty Jane said. “He died in bed with another woman. Sudden heart attack, though he had had a condition for years. I was the last to know. I hate his dirty guts for that. I'm glad the son-of-a-bitch is dead.” Her voice was steely; she was nowhere near tears.

He didn't know what to say. What a mistake it had been to call!

“You're
the only good man I ever knew,” Betty Jane said with a sudden intensity, “and I had to ruin that deal. I certainly had cause to regret what I did, even before this latest stunt which makes a mockery of my whole life.”

“What deal was that?”

“Oh,” said Betty Jane, “I guess you could of figured it out if you had been a little older, but we were both such young kids then, Jack…. You probably never thought about it later on, what with becoming such a big star like you did, but I once told you I was pregnant and you acted like you really believed me. Oh, I hope you didn't! Tell me you didn't. Tell me,
please
. I'd rather you dropped me for some other reason. I couldn't reproach myself in that case.”

Jackie hung up. So even his kid had been taken from him. There could be no dealing with the matter of Jackie Kellog except total annihilation.

III

T
HE
LITTLE
MAN
looked grubbier than ever in the squalid office lighted only by the bare bulb at the end of the wire that hung from the ceiling.

“I should have known better,” said Walter Hunsicker. “I've copy-edited a number of show-business books, autobiographies, tell-all memoirs. Other type of performers tend to name-drop, boast of their sexual conquests, give some political platitudes, but now and again at least, the reader might get a glimpse of something that might be called a human being underneath it all. But comedians can never stop performing, in whichever medium. It's always jokes. While amusing to everyone else, that must be a sad state of affairs for them. Imagine never being able to be serious.”

The little man grimaced. “Jackie Kellog wasn't sad: he was a nasty son-of-a-bitch. That those whose business is comedy are compensating for some profound personal sorrow is crap: it's only a self-serving excuse for being cruel. If they weren't telling jokes they might be torturing their loved ones. The fact is that human beings are amused by seeing their fellows in pain—” Hunsicker tried to protest here, but was forestalled by a raised hand. “Of course, there is a point at which, if the cruelty is too vulgar, the amusement lessens—unless the torturers are political or religious or sexual fanatics, but there's no paucity of those, as history or in fact the daily paper will prove.”

Hunsicker did not altogether disagree with this savage commentary on his breed, but he was annoyed at the man's self-righteousness: either this character was himself human, and thus the same fundamental sadist as the rest of us, or he partook in some way in divinity, in which case he might well be asked why his crowd had made us as we were, when, starting from scratch, they could presumably have turned out anything they wanted.

But what he said was, “Jackie Kellog was as unlikely a role for me as the slumlord. In choosing those lives, maybe I was getting something out of my system: I'd like to think it was my loathing for their most prominent traits.”

“I'm sure it was,” said the little man, but he was being obviously sardonic.

“All right,” Hunsicker said, “I'll admit it really was nice when Jackie would come out on stage and receive an ovation—mind you, from those whom he was going to insult for the next hour! And look how cops and other functionaries sucked up to Kellog-the-tycoon: that wasn't hard to take. I think it could be said of Jackie as comic that he didn't have much success with persons, but he was, at the height of his career anyway, loved by people. They'd line up to touch his hand!”

“Would you say there's something monstrous about any performer?” asked the little man. “It's more obvious with a standup comic, but it's just as true of an actor who plays only in the classical theater, no?”

But being familiar now with the other side of the fence, Hunsicker wanted to make a different point. “Listen here,” said he. “Even with the applause, when you're up there in front of
them
you're always scared.”

“Of what?”

“That they'll turn on you at any moment. You're right, it
is
an unnatural situation. But it requires a good deal of courage.”

“Or desperation,” the little man said. “And I think you'll agree that the audience turning on you is not the ultimate fear. No, the worst is that they'll turn
away
. Then you'd be alone again, all by yourself. That's the real horror.”

The odd thing is that the man did not for once seem to speak derisively: there was a suggestion of genuine feeling here.

“Are you speaking from experience?”

The other returned immediately to his usual style and said, with a disagreeable smirk, “All the world's a stage…”

Hunsicker felt a sudden pang. “My son was active in prep-school and college dramatics. I always thought he had a real talent, enough to have a professional try anyhow, and was willing to underwrite him, at least to the limits of my modest resources. But it's Elliot who's always been the conservative when it comes to financial matters. He wouldn't hear of such a thing. Elliot has always been the fogy in our family.”

“Then you're back again to stay? You're Walter Hunsicker, and you accept your lot in life.”

But Hunsicker, on a surge of defiance, cried, “No! Certainly not. I'm going to beat this: I
have
to. But the next time I must be somebody I can be proud of—someone Martha and Elliot would have been proud of, had they known, though they can't ever know…. It's complicated. They will never have lived, but as of this moment they are back in existence, suffering…”

The little man stirred impatiently. “So what will it be?”

“I suppose it would make sense to go back to my earlier life for an idea,” Hunsicker said. “Maybe a bit later than when I wanted to ride the range with Hoot Gibson, though it too was probably partly influenced by the movies. I did read a lot as a kid and at some point began to think I might like to be a writer, but I also have memories of films I saw in which authors wore ascots and smoked pipes and holed up in quaint little cottages in Connecticut and wrote novels or plays—”

The little man sniffed and asked, “Given your opportunity to choose any role in all of existence, your choice is one that does not act but rather
represents?”
He sniffed again. “Interesting.”

“As a young chap I thought I might wait till I had some experiences and then write about them. But I was in the service between wars, at camps in the U.S., didn't have any combat or foreign
mise en scènes
to write about. Then I got married, became a father, and had to make a living. My job has involved me with the other side of writing: they don't mix, generally speaking. The way I have to read a manuscript is not conducive to creativity. Some of the most noted authors spell badly, make grammatical errors, real howlers, you wouldn't believe it. In my job one doesn't always have the respect for writers that one probably should have, that one started with. But many of them are so awful! Of course, they all think they're Tolstoys and sometimes go so far as to insist that some incorrect usage is right because it's theirs: that correct usage becomes so through being that of great writers.” Kellog cleared his throat, thickened with indignation. “Well, it does. But there's a question as to who's great.”

He might have continued with another audience, but the little man, bored, said, “What you
are
is your business. Mine is concerned with what you'd rather be.”

Kellog had to add, “My job doesn't bring me as close to authors as if I were an acquisition editor. And just as well! The average writer is a self-pitying neurotic with some kind of addiction, most often alcohol though it can be anything else as well, drugs, sex, sometimes all of them at once, he's usually in debt, a monster of vanity, wracked with envy…”

“It sounds as though you've just about talked yourself into it,” said the little man.

“The fact remains that without them there'd be nothing to edit or print. Even if what they produce is drivel, it didn't exist before they produced it.”

“That doesn't sound especially valuable to me,” said the other. “The same thing could be said of excrement.”

It might well have been the Philistinism of that remark that stung Kellog into making his decision. There was an ongoing need for all persons of culture to make common cause against barbarism.

T
HE
COLLEGE
magazine,
The Owl
, had printed Kellog's first fiction, the characters in which were soldiers in the war just ended. In response he received a note of commendation from the man who taught the creative-writing course which in fact John had not taken: one Brock Forrester, a professor of English but also a genuine author in that he had published several short stories in national magazines. John had seen one once in his dentist's waiting room but hadn't had time to read it before being called to the chair.

Forrester wore a brushy mustache that concealed most of his mouth. His salt-and-pepper hair was wiry and abundant. He removed his horn-rimmed glasses when Kellog entered the office.

“Yes,” said he, “I found much to praise in the story, but the reason I asked you to come see me was that you also made a lot of errors, which I didn't like to mention in the note because I like to always accentuate the positive, like the song says.” He stuck a pipe under his mustache. It already had tobacco in it, for he proceeded to light it and puff smoke. “I'll make an exception and let you join my class at midterm, if you want.” He took the pipe from his mouth, pointed the stem at John, and said jovially, “Now there's an offer to conjure with.”

Forrester's class met at the same hour as the section of Spanish that John had been pressured into signing up for by his faculty adviser, who assured him that the language, unlike the two years of French with which he had already satisfied the requirement, would be invaluable now that the war was over, “with our increasing business with the up-and-coming nations south of the border, down Mexico way, like the song says.” Having no interest in Spanish, John was not reluctant to switch to Forrester's course, which he had scarcely noticed heretofore, for he had not thought of writing as a subject to be studied. If it were, then Forrester, a professor of it, ought to be a celebrity in the field, like…actually, no names of living writers came to mind, all of John's favorites being practitioners of the past like Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. Surely Poe never made a formal study of writing. And perhaps was the worse for it, according to Forrester's theory, which held that there was no worker in words, however exalted, whose text could not have been improved by extensive editing and rewriting in response to suggestions by such teachers as himself.

John was thrilled, on the first day he attended the class, to hear Forrester read his college-magazine story aloud. It was astonishing to learn how one's words might be improved by the human voice, and Forrester was a gifted actor, changing tones for each of the characters and sometimes even adding regional accents of which the author had made only slight indications if any. He was certainly being hospitable, to do this before a group of students all of whom, unlike John, had been with him for the preceding semester.

But when the reading was done Forrester said, “There you have our new arrival. Now, who wants to be the first to assault him?”

Assuming that this remark was facetious, Kellog looked eagerly from his seat in the back row to see who responded. Three or four hands were in the air, including that of a girl in a tight sweater of robin's egg blue. She also had bright blond hair, worn in front in bangs that came just to her eyebrows. But it was not she whom Forrester chose.

“Mr. Backlin?”

Backlin was a stocky fellow with a low forehead and, at twenty, a five o'clock shadow. “Well,” said he, “it really doesn't work in so many ways I don't know just where to start. One, the characterization is poor; these are cardboard figures. You can't tell one from the other.”

But that was the idea, said John to himself. He tried to keep his expression from betraying the feeling he had against Backlin.

A guy named Ross spoke next. He derided the story for its use of dashes for foul language. “Either we use the words and let the chips fall where they may,” said he, “or use other words that convey the sense of obscenity without being obscene. Oh, that may not always be easy, but then writing is supposed to require some effort. This is just laziness.”

Next a skinny brunette named Kleemeyer said, “There are some very good things in it—”

A general groan was heard, and somebody said, “Name one!”

“Come on now,” said Miss Kleemeyer. “The sergeant from Brooklyn, he's not a badly drawn character.”

“He's out of every second-rate war movie Hollywood ever made!” jeered Backlin.

“I didn't say he was original,” noted Miss Kleemeyer. “I just said he has something.”